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theweatherelectric writes "Mozilla has put together a demo which combines WebRTC with Firefox's Social API. Over on Mozilla's Future Releases blog, Maire Reavy writes, 'WebRTC is a powerful new tool that enables web app developers to include real-time video calling and data sharing capabilities in their products. While many of us are excited about WebRTC because it will enable several cool gaming applications and improve the performance and availability of video conferencing apps, WebRTC is proving to be a great tool for social apps. Sometimes when you're chatting with a friend, you just want to click on their name and see and talk with them in real-time. Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos — or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in – simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.'"

Last time I used it, it was far more prone to weird rendering problems and crashes (possibly a result of bad markup/code, but as a user of the browser I don't really care why those things happen) and the GUI still felt, as it had for years, like something out of Windows 95.

Not terrible, but a distant third for me. I could have put "*shudder*" next to Safari too, since the only browser I actually enjoy using right now is Chrome.

Maybe Mozilla's creative process will turn out to be cyclical and there'll be a

I really don't understand your choice and I've heared this before. The code base of Chrome is a lot larger and Chrome actually uses more memory (partly because of it's multi process model). So it really does not make a lot of sense.

All I know is launching Chrome with two dozen tabs open is faster than launching Firefox with two, and doesn't make my system fan kick on. It also doesn't make my other heavyweight applications less responsive like having FF open does; I get way more busy spinners and unresponsive GUI elements system-wide when FF is running. I can open a new tab without delay with tons of other tabs open, while FF is always sluggish to do the same even with only a couple tabs open.

If you were likewise confused by this blurb about clicking on friends' names in the browser, what WebRTC actually is at a technological level, at least, is basically a collection of real-time P2P streaming-media stuff that is currently usually implemented via browser plugins or 3rd-party software. W3C is trying to standardize and expose it via more normal javascript APIs.

The basic functionality will include things like: users opening video or audio streams with each other (which includes NAT-punching, negotiating codecs, etc.) to support Skype-style video chat in the browser; streaming logic to deal with sending/buffering/etc. for P2P streams; support for data connections directly between users, to allow browser-based multiplayer gaming to bypass a central server; and some kind of management of local multimedia resources that I don't fully understand.

You're going to get modded down (probably rightly so) for your flame presentation, but your content is true: the thing that most slashdotters don't appreciate is that 99.99% of the world does not use computers to "hack out perl scripts and learn that exciting new regular expression syntax". They use computing to socialize. It's an extension of their social circle, which explains why things like Facebook are so wildly popular. But it's certainly true that a certain segment of the population doesn't get th

I don't think techies object to using technology for socialization. That's something techies themselves have been doing for decades! Even years ago before so many "normal" people were on the internet, social technologies like IRC, Usenet, and mailing lists were extremely popular.

That's how web standards work. Multiple browsers try out alpha implementations to figure how the feature should actually work and get feedback on it. The browser developers discuss what precisely the final standard should look like and then declare it a standard once they agree. I'm not sure about these standards, but at least in CSS there's prefixing (putting "-webkit-", etc. in front of properties) to prevent any confusion about draft vs. final standards.

... the documentation on these features exist, and the Social API works for more things than just Facebook. There's literally a whitelist in the browser (about:config, key social.activation.whitelist) which only allows Facebook to use the Social API features. (And if you edit the whitelist yourself and try to use the feature on a different site, it just re-opens the Facebook sidebar because Facebook's siderbar seems to be hardcoded in other places too.)

When the browser asks you if you want to use one of these features, just click No. No one is forcing you to use a Facebook siderbar.

Meanwhile, the Mozilla folks have been dodging HTML4 and CSS3 for over twelve years [mozilla.org]. You tell me, what sounds like a better use of time: bloating the browser with some bullshit Facebook-specific plugin or allowing for decimal aligned numbers in tables?

Sadly, Firefox becomes less and less relevant as they try the most hamfisted ways to maintain relevance.

Why would you assume that? Eventually, the social API is going to work for sites other than Facebook too. Would you assume that Firefox periodically tries to contact every single site that supports the feature even when you didn't enable it? That's ridiculous.

Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos â" or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in â" simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.'"

In other words, what iChat has allowed me to do for half a decade? I've used it to run contract negotiations with the contract document shared via iChat to all parties, for example.

"it will enable several cool gaming applications"
Any product that includes 'Cool' in the description is automatically off my list of things I need. You don't see a "cool,new seatbelt design' or a 'cool, new high fiber cereal'..... do ya?

To ensure a baseline level of interoperability between WebRTC
clients, a minimum set of required codecs are specified below. While
this section specifies the codecs that will be mandated for all
WebRTC client implementations, it leaves the question of supporting
additional codecs to the will of the implementer.

Yes, this is really cool. Opus really is the best of all and it's royalty free and had an open source implementation. Yes, it was partly done by Skype and the people from http://xiph.org/ [xiph.org] thus it is BSD-licensed.